Qantas boss Alan Joyce has proved what I’ve been saying all along in terms of Sydney’s second airport: Qantas will not put its planes and the big carriers will not put its planes at the second airport. What they see the second airport doing is basically being a house for budget airlines.
The question that has to be asked is: is this a good use of scarce government dollars when what we should be doing is lifting the capacity of Kingsford Smith.
And I certainly do agree, in a rare moment of agreement with the Government, we should not be putting money early on into a rail link to Badgerys Creek.
There are a lot of needs for Western Sydney: schools, hospitals, better infrastructure. And we should not be wasting money early on, when we don’t have the money there, in doing this and Alan Joyce has shown exactly what we’ve said: If people think that Qantas and Virgin are going out to the second airport — think again.
This is more about keeping Northern and Eastern Sydney residents happy about the existence of a second airport, rather than actually delivering a vital piece of infrastructure for Sydney’s west.